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which eventually petered out. We were waiting to hear from Brower. He looked at the back of the little room, over our heads, and said, “If it were me, I would kill myself.” Then hedirected our attention to a passage from the book we were reading closely together, E. M. Forster’s
Where Angels Fear to Tread
.
    During senior year, I met with Brower nearly every week in the grand study-library that was his office in Adams House, the undergraduate residence where he was master. We talked of many things besides my thesis on
The Odyssey
, which he read with the same scrupulous attention he gave to all texts. It was a terrifying scrutiny—which, since he undoubtedly applied the same high standards to his own writing, explained in some measure why his scholarly output had been limited over the years, limited but diamond hard and exemplifying authority.
    What I remember most clearly from those meetings was something Brower said about Greek composition, probably in reaction to my complaining about Greek K, which I found a dry exercise in turning English paragraphs into pastiches of Plato’s Greek. Following the custom of centuries of students in this deliberately uncreative discipline, we were constrained to use only the exact vocabulary, grammatical constructions and syntax that Plato himself, the acknowledged master and model of classic Greek prose, had used.
    Brower defended precisely what I deplored: “What would it mean to improvise an ancient Greek sentence? Greek is not an ongoing enterprise. It is only what the ancient Greeks wrote. The sole reason to compose sentences in Greek today is to revive, as best we can, their language, so that we can feel it as our own. That—in theory, at any rate—makes us better readers of Plato.” There was no arguing with that. There was never any arguing with Reuben Arthur Brower, gentle man, with adamantine soul.
    The lesson took. So when I thought about classic French food, another seemingly finite body of received culture, it was natural for me to think of it as I had been trained to think about dead languages. This was not a good analogy. As I soon realized, themost cursory look at early French cookbooks revealed a universe of cooking far removed from the haute cuisine system that grew up in the nineteenth century and that we had inherited in the form codified by Escoffier, a system that would shortly dissolve into a kaleidoscope of new, shimmering ideas before our dazzled eyes.
    Even regional “cuisines” turned out to have histories. The “classic” dish of the Auvergne, in central France, the puree of potatoes and cheese called
aligot
, could not have been older than the introduction of potatoes into France from the Andes after Columbus. According to one theory, it was “originally” made with bread instead of potatoes, by monks who gave it to pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Similarly, in Spain, gazpacho in its present tomato-based form could not have been cooked before the sixteenth century and probably emerged much later. Cervantes’s gazpacho is not ours.
    Pizza has a history, too. Of course, everything has a history. But that is not what was in my mind in the 1960s when I was discovering the food of Europe and the rest of the world. The historical attitude would come later. And I was also not describing the reality of my experience as an eater in those years when I maintained that my ecstatic gorging was some sort of cold-blooded investigation of a vast archaeological museum of human food culture.
    In fact, I was just eating whatever piqued my interest, in restaurant after restaurant, country after country, region after region—and trying to taste as many dishes as I possibly could. I’m sure I never gave a thought, in the summer of 1960, my first time in Europe, to cuisines as calcified legacies. I was, of course, eating my way through the cuisines of Europe, but unsystematically, happily devouring the menu at hand.
    My approach, instinctive, rabid